THE EXPULSION: A crime
against humanity

By Dr. Alfred de Zayas

The documentary travelling
exhibition "In the
Claws of the Red
Dragon" in Pittsburgh
in 1988 (2 years before the totally unexpected collapse of Communism
in Europe in November, 1989) organized in cooperation with Dr.
Marianne
Bouvier and
B. John
Zavrel. The exhibition
was also shown in the Rotunda of the
US Senate
Building, under the
sponsorship of the late
Senator
Heinz.

The main speaker was Dr.
Alfred de
Zayas, a prominent
expert in international law; he is an American of Spanish-French
descent. After law school at Harvard, de Zayas went to Germany on a
Fulbright
fellowship, took
doctorate in History at the University of Goettingen.
He works as a legal
consultant in New York and Geneva,
Switzerland, and is the
author of several books dealing with the subject of the Expulsion of
Germans in Europe.

The following is a transcript of the essential
part of the excellent lecture on the Expulsion which he gave in
Pittsburgh.

Dear Friends,

When I was a student of history at Harvard back in
1970, I knew nothing at all about the Expulsion of Germans. None of
my history professors considered this event sufficiently notable to
mention it, much less to assign a research paper on it. It was
curiously not in history class, but in a seminar on Law of War that I
first heard about the Expulsion.

At that time I still could not read or speak
German, but my law professor, the late Richard Baxter, who was
subsequently the American judge at the International Court of
Justice, encouraged me to pursue the matter and he brought to my
attention two books in English that touched upon the subject matter.
Those were the books of Victor Gollancz Our Threatened Values and In
Darkest Germany. Victor Gollancz was a British socialist and a human
rights activist. I was so impressed by Gollancz that I later
dedicated my first book, Nemesis at Potsdam, to his
memory.

Now, when I first approached the subject matter, I
thought naively enough that it was a legitimate field of research,
like any other. But I soon learned that it was no accident that there
was nearly nothing written in English on the theme -- it was taboo,
it was not chic, it was not fashionable to do research or to publish
in this field.

After all, Germans were looked at in a rather
monolithic fashion as all Nazis, and not deserving any degree of
human sympathy. As citizens of the "evil empire" they were morally
disqualified "ad illicio."

It is perhaps curious to compare it with the way
the press today deals with the Soviet system, but thank God the press
has not thought of disqualifying the Russian people and considering
them "ad illicio" as criminals only because their system is an
inhuman, anti-democratic system.

Now, what actually happened with regard to the
Germans at the end of the Second World War, the previous speaker has
already outlined and given you the figures of the Expulsion.
Obviously you can take the simplistic view and say, "Hitler started
the war, he lost the war, therefore the Germans have to take the
consequences," but I don't think that this axiom actually exhausts
the subject matter.

As you may or may not know, the
expulsion syndrome was actually started by Hitler himself. After
subjugating Poland, he
expelled over 1 million Poles from western Poland, from the areas
that were annexed by the Reich, and pushed them off into so-called
General-government Poland,
and he also expelled
over 100,000 French from Alsace-Lorraine into Vichy
France.And this was a matter that
curiously enough was condemned by the Allies during the war, and
at the time of the
Nuremburg Trials, this
expulsion that Hitler carried out for the purpose of "Lebensraum" --
pushing out one ethnic group in order to settle the area with your
own -- was declared to
be a war crime, and a crime against humanity.

Not only in the London Agreement, that was the
basis of the Nuremberg Trials, but throughout the trials, and the
hearings, and the proceedings, it was constantly brought up, and a
number of the German leaders were actually convicted of committing
these specific crimes, war crimes and crimes against humanity on the
basis of these mass expulsions.
So that it is a particular
anomaly that the Allies
themselves got involved
in a policy of
expulsion of a far greater extent
than the one that had
been carried out under the Nazis.

Now, it is not just the Expulsion that is of
interest to us and you have seen the pictures, a great many of which
are devoted to the flight of German civilians from the Red Army in
1944.

In October of 1944 the Red Army
entered East Prussia, and they entered the
area of Gumbinden,
Nemmersdorf, and
Metgethen and they
occupied the area for approximately two weeks and pretty much
slaughtered the
civilian population.

Thereupon the German army was able to re-occupy
the area, and they realized what had happened. The legal division of
the German Army was given the assignment of investigating what had
happened; a great many persons, -- witnesses who saw the bodies, when
they came in, -- gave their depositions, and their sworn testimony is
available for the study of any researchers.

Now, it was this kind of
occupation by the Russians that forced the
flight. You may compare the American
occupation of the Rhineland, of Duesseldorf, of Cologne, of Koblenz,
and you will realize that the Germans living in these areas had no
need to flee from the American Army,
whereas you had
5 million Germans from
East Prussia, from Pomerania, Silesia, East
Brandenburg, who
helter-skelter and pell-mell had to leave the area. Surely, not
because they wanted to leave the area in the middle of the winter of
1945, but because they realized that the
entire population of
Nemmersdorf and of other cities
had been
liquidated.

This aspect of the Expulsion, just the loss of
life involved would have been enough, I would say, for any historian
to devote attention to it, but as I already mentioned, the flight has
been largely ignored.

Now, these refugees were
basically turned into expellees
when they were not
allowed to return to their
homeland. Because
certainly at the time of the flight, the German refugees were
expecting to return to their homelands at the end of
hostilities.

But, before I go into the nature of the Expulsion
itself, I wanted to cite from George Kennan as to the nature of the
flight. In his Memoirs, Volume 1, page 265, he wrote

"the disaster that befell this
area, (speaking of East Prussia) with the entry of the Soviet forces
has no parallel in modern European experience. There were
considerable sections of it where, to judge by all existing evidence,
scarcely a man, woman,
or child of the indigenous population was left alive after the
initial passage of Soviet
forces; and one cannot
believe that they all succeeded in fleeing to the
West."

Obviously Kennan's Memoirs are not devoted to the
Expulsion of the Germans, but he does have several pages in which he
describes it from the perspective of an American official at the
American embassy in Moscow.

As far as the decisions with regard to the
Expulsion of the
Germans, those were taken as early as at
the Teheran Conference, and confirmed, or actually expanded, at the
Yalta Conference, and finally at the
Potsdam
Conference, where they were more or less
articulated in ARTICLE 13
of the Potsdam Protocol.

In this
ARTICLE
13the allies agreed that it
was necessary to transfer the German populations from what they
referred to as Poland,
Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They did not
mention the Donauschwaben, the areas in Yugoslavia, or the areas in
Rumania, but in fact all of these countries were in the process of
pushing the Germans out at the time.

And the reason for these expulsions from East
Prussia, Rumania and from Silesia was ostensibly that Poland was to
be given compensation. Compensation for the territory of eastern
Poland that had been annexed by the Soviet Union pursuant to the
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939.

People, and very many
historians conveniently seem to forget that the outbreak of the
World War II in 1939
was caused not only by Hitler, but also by
Stalin: Soviet Union
invading the eastern half of Poland,
and Germany invading
the western half.

Stalin made it very clear at
Teheran that he was certainly intending to keep the half of Poland
that he had invaded,
and he ended up keeping it. But not only that, he ended up taking up
a good slice of East Prussia, which is today part of the Soviet
Union, and Koenigsberg
is today, as you all probably know, called
"Kaliningrad."

As far as the lip service that was paid to human
rights, you will read in ARTICLE 13 of the Potsdam Protocol, that
these expulsions were to be carried out in an "orderly and humane
fashion."

Now, as far as the nature of the Expulsion, or the
manner in which the expulsions were carried out, I wanted to quote
very briefly from Victor Gollancz's book "Our Threatened Values", on
page 96 where he says:

"If the conscience of men ever
again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to
the undying shame of
all who committed or connived
them ... The Germans
were expelled, not just
with an absence of over-nice consideration,
but with the very
maximum of brutality."

Now, I'm quoting Gollancz precisely because he is
not German. In the German archives in Koblenz, you have over 40,000
reports of survivors that are open to all researchers, and there you
will see what the survivors have to say.

Some critical voices might say they have an axe to
grind, that they are just trying to excuse themselves. But you have
extensive documentation -- American, British, French documentation
that prove the nature of the expulsions as an exceedingly cruel and
brutal expulsion.

Particularly sad is the fact that if you compare
that with our commitments, because after all, ostensibly the
Americans and British entered the war on behalf of democracy and for
certain principles of humanity and fair play -- and, after all, in
August of 1941 President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had
agreed in the middle of the Atlantic on the ship Augusta on the
so-called Atlantic Charter, and the Atlantic Charter provided that
neither would seek territorial or other aggrandizement, and they both
undertook a commitment to oppose, and I quote, "territorial changes
that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples
concerned."

So, in light of the principles
which we ourselves proclaimed as our peace aims, it is most
regrettable that at the end of the war we did not live up to those
principles.

The moral question therefore
arises: if the allies fought against the Nazi enemy because of this
inhuman message, could they then adopt some of those same methods in
retribution? Who was it
then who succeeded in imposing his methods on the other? Whose
outlook triumphed?

I think this is a question that we all have to
answer to ourselves.

Robert Murphy, the political advisor of General
Eisenhower, and later the political advisor of Clay during the
occupation in Germany, was one of the first official voices in the
American government that opposed the Expulsion, and to criticize the
manner in which the Expulsion was being carried out.

In a memorandum to the State Department of 12
October 1945 he presented this moral dilemma very eloquently, and I
quote in part:

"Knowledge that they are the victims of a harsh
political decision carried out with the utmost ruthlessness and
disregard for the humanities does not cushion the effect. The mind
reverts to other mass deportations which horrified the world and
brought upon the Nazis the odium which they so deserved. Those mass
deportations engineered by the Nazis provided part of the moral basis
on which we waged war and which gave strength to our cause. Now the
situation is reversed. We find ourselves in the invidious position of
being partners in this German enterprise and as partners inevitably
sharing the responsiblity."

As a result of this and all the
memoranda of Murphy, the
American government
repeatedly protested at
Warsaw and at Prague and tried to get some cooperation from the
Czechoslovak government and from the Polish
government.

But unfortunately the
Soviet occupation
forces in those areas
encouraged both the
Polish and the Czechoslovak governments in the
Expulsion, so there was no way for the
U.S. to effectively stop it.

With regard to the legal
aspects of the
Expulsion,
were such expulsions to take place today, there is
no question that it
would constitute the
violation of various
provisions of
international law.

ARTICLE
49 of the
Geneva
Convention of 1949
prohibits specifically
such expulsions. I'm
speaking of the Geneva Convention for the protection of
civilians.

ARTICLES
3 and
4
of the Fourth Protocol of the
European Human Rights
Convention also
prohibits such
expulsions.

It would also be
incompatible
with ARTICLES
12 and
13
of the International Covenant on civil and political
rights.

It would be
incompatible
with the General
Convention of 1948 and
with several other instruments.

But obviously, at the time of the Expulsion none
of these instruments were in force.
So the only applicable
principles were the
Hague
Conventions, in
particular, the Hague Regulations,
ARTICLES
42-56, which limited
the rights of occupying powers -- and obviously
occupying powers have
no rights to expel the
populations -- so there
was the clear violation of the Hague Regulations.

And, obviously, if you want
to apply the
Nuremberg
principles to the
German Expulsions, considering that the
London Agreement was supposed to reflect, and not to create
international law, so if
that was applicable to the German crimes against the Poles with
regard to deportation of Poles, and
deportation of French for purposes of "Lebensraum,"
certainly it was applicable
to the expulsions by
the Poles of Germans and by the Czechs of Germans.

So, if you apply these
Nuremberg principles
and the Nuremberg
judgement, you would
have to arrive at the conclusion that
the Expulsion of the
Germans clearly
constituted war crimes
and crimes against humanity.

Now as you all know, the more than 12 million
German expellees who survived, and who have come to the Federal
Republic of Germany, have been integrated into the democracy that the
Federal Republic of Germany is, and have contributed to the European
reconstruction and to the so-calledWirtschaftswunder, which was facilitated through the
funds of the Marshall Plan.

And one of the most noble
things that the German expellees did, and
I would invite all non-Germans to try to place yourselves in the
position of the German expellees, and try to see it through their
eyes, what it meant having
lost homelands that were over 700 years German;
having lost half of
their families in the process of the
expulsion, having
suffered what they all suffered, having being spoliated and having
been victimized, -- what it meant to adopt
the Stuttgart Charter of the German Expellees,
which provides specifically
for
renunciation
of revenge and renunciation of violence.

I wanted to quote from this document, which is
also on one of the placards. I quote:

"We, the expellees, renounce all thought of
revenge and retaliation. Our resolution is a solemn and sacred one,
in memory of the infinite suffering brought upon mankind,
particularly during the past decade."

Now, consider what it meant to write that, at a
time when the memories were still very fresh, and when the wounds
were not yet healed.

I think it is a tremendous contribution to peace,
tremendous contribution to the normalization of the post-war
Europe.

For this contribution of the German expellees to
peace in Europe, earlier this year the German American National
Congress (DANK) passed a resolution to nominate the Union of
Expellees for the Nobel Peace Prize, thus joining the earlier
initiative of parliament members of several nations from the European
Parliament.

Why this honor to the Union of
Expellees?

Because the German expellees have done more for
peace in Europe, than they are credited for. Indeed, the more than 12
million surviving expellees from East Prussia, Pomerania, East
Brandenburg, Silesia, Sudetenland, etc. could have turned to
terrorism like the Palestinian refugees, and they could have
developed into a major destabilizing element in Europe after
1945.

Instead, they proclaimed the Charter of the German
Expellees in 1950, in which they proclaimed themselves to the
peaceful reconstruction of Europe, and pledged never to use violent
means to achieve their right to the homeland.

We must also keep in mind,
however, that these
expellees and their descendants are
today -- 43 years after
the Expulsion -- still
waiting for a just settlement of this great
injustice, and for
return to their
ancestral homelands in
the Central and Eastern Europe.

As a final thought, I wanted to encourage all
students here, to consider the Expulsion of the Germans as a
worthwhile field of research.

I would like to encourage
professors to give research papers and research assignments on the
basis of the many, many aspects of the Expulsion. As I mentioned the
archives, both the
Bundesarchiv in
Koblenz, and also the National Archives in Washington are full of
relevant, unpublished
materials,
which would more than satisfy a doctoral requirement, if you wanted
to take a doctorate on any question of the Expulsion of the
Germans.

And more importantly, and I rather hope that it
will happen, I look forward
to the great novelist, who will put down this history in a
novel. I think that there is more than
enough material for a Gone With the Wind,
and I would welcome a
Margaret Mitchell, who would write a novel depicting
the very human and very
deeply felt tragedy of the
Expulsion of these
victims of politics and of politicians.